Where it sits
Almost every modern use sits at the left end of this line. Walpole's sits at the right.
Tell it apart
| Aspect | Serendipity | Luck |
|---|---|---|
| Requires alertness | Yes | No |
| Requires not-seeking | Yes | No |
| Can be cultivated | Partly | No |
| Walpole would allow it | Yes | No |
Luck requires nothing of you. Serendipity, as coined, requires two things at once: that you were not looking for it, and that you were sharp enough to see it. Drop the sagacity and you have merely renamed luck.
Opposite of Serendipity
- ZemblanityCoined by the novelist William Boyd as roughly the opposite of serendipity: unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries.
What it doesn't mean
Walpole's definition has two required ingredients. The princes were 'always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of'. Sagacity — the wit to interpret the accident — is not optional. His own example: one prince deduced a mule was blind in the right eye because the grass had been eaten only on the left side of the road. That is inference, not fortune. Walpole called the process 'accidental sagacity'.
Walpole explicitly excluded the case the word is most often used for: 'no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description.' If you were searching for it, it is not serendipity, however pleasant the surprise.
What it really means
On 28 January 1754, Horace Walpole wrote a letter and invented a word in it. He had been reading a tale he dismissed as a silly fairy tale — The Three Princes of Serendip — and noticed something about how its heroes operated.
They were, he wrote, always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.
Two ingredients. Not one. The accident is the half everyone kept. The sagacity — the wit to read the accident correctly — is the half that fell off, and it is the half that made the word worth having.
Walpole's own example is the test. One of the princes deduces that a mule that passed by was blind in its right eye, because the grass had been cropped only on the left side of the road. Nothing lucky happened there. Something unnoticed happened, and someone was paying attention at the level required to read it.
Then he adds the clause that invalidates most modern usage outright: no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description. If you were searching for it, it is not serendipity — however delightful the surprise.
So the strict definition has two locks: you weren't looking, and you were sharp enough to catch it anyway. Drop the second and you have renamed luck. Drop the first and you have renamed research.
One more thing about the word's own life, which is quietly appropriate. It stayed rare for nearly 150 years. A revival attempt in 1877 didn't take. It was still missing from the Century Dictionary in 1902. A word for finding what you weren't looking for spent a century and a half being exactly that.
Where it comes from
an old name for Ceylon / Sri Lanka
Arabic form of the name
Sanskrit — Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island
The word stayed rare for nearly 150 years. An 1877 revival attempt didn't take, and it was still absent from the Century Dictionary as of 1902.
- 28 January 1754
Horace Walpole coins the word in a letter to Horace Mann, written at Strawberry Hill. The letter was not published until 1833.
- 1722
An English version of the source tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, had appeared; the tale reached Europe via Venice in 1557.
In real life
- In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed that a mould contaminating one of his bacterial culture plates had cleared the bacteria around it — the accident led to penicillin because he stopped to ask why.
- Hunting for a cookbook in a second-hand shop, you pull out the wrong spine and find an old map of your street with your house drawn as an orchard. You weren't looking for it, but you knew at once what you had.
- The everyday, looser sense: 'We only met because both our trains were cancelled and we ended up sharing a taxi.' 'Pure serendipity.' Walpole would have called it luck, since nobody had to notice anything.
Questions
Q01Who invented the word serendipity?
Horace Walpole, in a letter dated 28 January 1754, after reading what he called a 'silly fairy tale' — The Three Princes of Serendip.
Q02Does serendipity just mean luck?
Not in Walpole's sense. He required sagacity alongside the accident, and explicitly ruled out anything you were actually searching for.
Q03Where does 'Serendip' come from?
It is an old name for Sri Lanka — Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa, 'Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island'.
Sources
- Etymonline — serendipity.
- Richard Boyle, The Three Princes of Serendip.
- Serendipity (related terms: zemblanity) — Wikipedia.